The King of the Kingdom Part 1
Text: Matthew 6:9-13
6:9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
6:10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
6:11 Give us this day our daily bread.
6:12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
6:13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
That is what has become in the orthodox setting, Our Lord’s prayer, but scripturally speaking, it is just a pattern, a simple guide to effective praying. It captures the principle of prayer as you come unto God and begin to relate with Him and make requests. These are just parameters for asking according to divine order.
We see that after exaltation, the first request we make in terms of God to ``do something`` or ``give something`` is in Verse 10, and it says: Thine kingdom come. And Verse 13 begins by saying ‘and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil:’ Notice the full colon after evil. I have said at different times that as you read a piece of literature, it is in the interest of getting the right interpretation for you to observe punctuation marks.
If you put a ‘full stop’ or ‘period’ where the writer did not put one, you could distort the message. It is important that we know why some of these punctuation marks are placed there. In this context, we find a full colon and I have come to know over the years that when you see a full colon in the middle of a sentence, it simply tells you to pay close attention to what is to follow because that is what carries the real message that the sentence sets out to communicate. The thought of the author is expressed by various punctuation marks. Where there is an exclamation, if you do not exclaim, you miss out on the feel of the message. Where there is a pause, if you do not pause, you miss out the emotion that drives the message. Note, after it said lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, there is a colon. The full colon simply tells us to pay closer attention to what is to follow because that is essentially what He wants to bring out. Every other thing is trying to introduce that important matter which comes after the colon.
After the full colon, we find the following: “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever, amen. That’s where our theme comes from: The Kingdom and the Power.
The interesting thing I see here is this: when it says lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: That request is predicated on the fact that the kingdom, the power, and the glory belong to our God. That is to say that if the Lord is going to deliver us from evil; if He is going to help us get around temptation and not to fall into temptation, it will be because His are the kingdom, the power and the glory. Put in another way, if He has no grip on the kingdom, the power and the glory, He would not be positioned to lead us not into temptation; He would not have the capability to deliver us from evil. He is able to answer our prayers in that regard because the kingdom is His own, the power is His own and the glory is His own. It means, therefore, that it is the strength of the kingdom that gives Him a placement; a positioning that would deliver the believer from evil and from temptation.
It is on the ground that our father has the kingdom, the power and the glory that we are can be sure to get delivered from evil. This is a good reason for us to launch into the realm of the kingdom. First, it says as we pray, we should say: thy kingdom come.
Beginning from the Old Testament certain scriptures provide specific encouragement in regard to our topic.
Psalm 145:11-13 All thy works shall praise thee O Lord, and thy saints shall bless thee. They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom and talk of thy power, to make known to the sons of men his mighty acts and the glorious majesty of His kingdom. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.
One thing is beginning to flow into our conscious awareness and that is, the Church is graduating into maturation state. Considering that sow many things that had arrested our attention in the year’s gone bye, no longer hold an appeal. Things that kept us excited, jumping and sweating over the years seem to have lost their hold on us. Put in another way, a lot of the things that kept people in the Church in the past, no longer keep them in the Church. I’m very much aware that majority of believers who are ten years old and above in the Lord, are getting tired of this issue of blowing the anointing and then people falling on the ground and giving the laundry guys some good money to clean up their clothes. We’ve also realized that the fashion of having to seize people’s neck and really put pressure on the carotid artery and causing them to faint all in the name of falling under the power of the Holy Ghost is no longer fashionable. People seem to be looking for something different; something deeper and what that implies is that there is a hunger in the Church for the teaching anointing. They want to know where they are going to and why they are where they are and why God is behaving the way He is behaving. Folks want to be properly instructed and that comes through the ministry of the latter rain.
Before the maturation and the harvesting of the plants spiritually, we are told that there would be an outpouring of the early and the latter rain and that will happen in the first month, and then, the harvest. The sickle is stuck in already. What is happening now which represents the latter rain is the teaching anointing. If you do not have the hunger to know the deep things of God, it simply means that you are still carrying the spirit of babes and we still need to dangle the toys around you to get you excited.
We can now see that people can be in a meeting for three hours, listening to a teaching and nobody is getting bored because the time has come. We’ve seen that teaching ministrations pull as much crowd as crusades do because after we have raked in so many believers, having given them the piece of cake, the pop corn, candy and hamburgers of rhetoric and positive confession; all the ‘just believe and all your problems would be over’. After they have tasted the kingdom as it were, questions begin to arise, questions that would only be answered by the teaching anointing. Until those questions are answered, people do not remain, they would be looking for alternative religions, and if we don’t want to risk their playing into the hands of the New Age Movement guys, then we must get back to the Book.
Dr. O. Ezekiel, the General Overseer of Christian Pentecostal Mission was sharing with us recently and he said: “You may have graduated from the Bible School, but you have not graduated from the Bible.” I was so, moved by that statement because it could be so deceptive to think now that you are a Bible School graduate, and you may unconsciously think you have graduated from the Bible One may be getting too big to fall in line with God’s word, become vulnerable in the hands of the enemy.
Now if the Lord says that the saints shall speak of the glory of His kingdom, and talk of the power of that kingdom and it says that kingdom has glorious majesty, that kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, it means that when we begin to talk about the kingdom, we are actually doing what is heart of God. In talking about God’s kingdom, there are some exciting things that would be provoked and that is why I’m beginning this theme with the topic: The king of the kingdom. If we are to talk about the kingdom, it would be in our interest to recognize without apology, that if there is a kingdom, then there is a king.
If we are going to have a kingdom, then we must have a king. May I put this question across to you: Which one comes first, the kingdom or the king? Yes, the king comes before the kingdom. Sometimes we have the false belief that if we can begin to put up a constitution and gather a crowd, then we shall have a kingdom. That is an attempt to put the cart before the horse. There will never be a kingdom unless there is a king. People have tried to build kingdoms before manifesting themselves as kings. People have tried to communicate the agenda of the kingdom without a clear definition of who the king is, and behold; unfortunately, the Church is guilty of this.
Over the years, unconsciously, perhaps because we didn’t have much of revelation, we have been preaching the gospel of the Church and not the gospel of the kingdom. As we get into the scriptures shortly, you will discover that Jesus never asked us to preach the gospel of the Church. We have regrettably relegated that great ministry to the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the point that they have what is called the Kingdom Hall. They’ve been go about for decades preaching of the kingdom whose king they don’t even recognize. They have talked so much about the kingdom and very little about the king! That is indeed very unfortunate. Our encouragement is that Spirit of God puts in us a strong expectation for the appearing of the King and then the restoration of the kingdom. Amen.
The whole thing about the expectation of the people of God was for a Messiah. The Old Testament was closes leaving the people with a longing for coming of a deliverer; a man who will come as a king, not as a savior- lamb to fight their battles, bring independence to them and set up a kingdom. That was why, just before resurrection, the one last question on their lips was about the kingdom.
Act 1:6 When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?
The whole thing about the gospel is on the premise of heralding the coming of a king. When Jesus was born, right there in Bethlehem (the house of bread) ...... we were told that wise men saw his star, and when they saw His star, they recognized the star as one that announced the birth of a king, and it was not one of the usual stars. They immediately packaged the stuff that reasonable people put together when it is time to visit a king. The type of stuff that churches want their parishioners to package today, when most believers have not really neither seen the king nor his star. There will constantly be a struggle and manipulative tendencies to get the people to give unto God as unto a king in quality offering and worship with their substance if they have no revelation of Him as the king.
The only way we can get a people to give of their substance, wealth and their very best to any person at all who is not a king is by coercion and manipulation. And because the Church has not been groomed to know who the king is, rather has only emphasized the priesthood ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ; it has been difficult for most people to bring any other substance other than sin offering. As long as one is seeing Jesus only as a savior and as a priest, he cannot truly worship him as king. That is why when people are called upon to worship with their gifts, there comes grumbling in the heart; but when the wise men saw that this was a king, they knew it was time to worship with treasure filled hands. May I remind you that if he is not a king, he is not entitled to worship? Priests do not accept worship; they are not to be worshipped. Their ministry is to lead people in worship. If you have been worshipping Jesus based on your revelation of him as priest then you have been doing something that is like idolatry. If all you know about Jesus is his priestly ministry, it will be hard for you to actually worship.
When Jesus was born, the great controversy was on the strength of one thing; that a king was born and because a king was born and the wise men testified to it, the incumbent king in the domain of His birth felt threatened. Herod couldn’t sleep because wise men came into his jurisdiction and asked about the king has just been born. If they had told Herod that a priest had been born, he would not have been perturbed. He knew that since they were talking about a king, that his kingdom was in danger. There cannot be two kings in a kingdom. For another king to be emerging in his kingdom meant that his kingdom is being threatened; his throne was under attack, so he raised a counter attack. He asked the wise men to show him where the king was so that he would go and worship him also.
The wise men went with gold, frankincense and myrrh. Even though the baby was still in the manger, they were going to worship a king so they went with their substance. They probably had to withdraw so much money from their accounts. Any time you are privileged to approach onto the throne of a king, common sense tells you to arm yourself that will make the king remember your visit. That is what matters. If you drop it before His throne, be rest assured that twenty times more of what you gave will come back your way and so people delighted in association and leaving a memory or a memorial before the throne. If you did a work of art, you will readily want to donate it to the king so that he will display it in his palace and you will have the joy to tell people that your work is in the palace. That gives you a lot of favor, respect, protection. Herod soon ordered that every male child two years and under be slaughtered hoping to kill the king in the process. So the life of Jesus was in danger from the very moment he was born because of the kingly ministry. Today, what the devil is trying to attack is the kingly ministry. I am quite certain that this is what God is advancing through the Church at this hour and if you are hearing any other message, you are probably not as current as you ought to be, because the real battle confronting our faith is about this. As we begin to stir up the consciousness of the kingly ministry it will get increasingly clear that Christianity will continuously advance on the wheels of battles; then all your air conditioned cars, with your parade of security men would be grossly inadequate to contend with the assault and violence that the kingdom suffers until you know what substance you are made up of. When you begin to see many innocent people sacrificed, it is all about the throne.
But why would Herod go that far; to get all the children two years old and younger massacred? He decreed all the male children should be slaughtered. Is the kingly ministry such a great deal? YES!
It was in the matter of wanting a king that Israel at a time incurred the wrath of God. Let’s put it this way: The first time they stood to challenge God’s order was when they began to demand for a king so that they can be like other nations. They had lost sight of Jehovah as their king, they began to crave for a physical king, and when it became clear that without a king, they were no longer interested in celebrating God, He gave them Saul who was just a predecessor to the real man, David.
There is something you must grasp here: When Jesus began to minister, the expectation of the people was that he would carry arms and begin to deliver them from their oppressors so they were asking when that would happen. And because Jesus was not forthcoming, he was doing things that did not resemble the operations of a king, suddenly it was time to ride triumphantly into Jerusalem, the city of the great king and the children and all the disciples began to sing: "Hosanna; blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord." See,
Mark 11: 10-11
"Blessed be the kingdom of Our Father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.
"And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve."
John 12:13 "They took branches of palm trees and went forth to meet him and cried Hosanna; Blessed is the king of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord."
There’s something you probably would have noticed. In Mark 11:10 account, it says "Blessed be the kingdom of Our Father David, that cometh in the….
In one place it is the kingdom that is comes and in the other places it is the king that comes… in the name of the Lord.
Interpreting scripture with scripture, we can safely say that the coming of the kingdom is the same as the coming of the king. When the kingdom is coming in the context of what we are sharing, it is the king that is coming and until we learn to harmonize both, we will not be able to properly line up with the spirit of the scriptures and that is the point now that triggered off the series of events that led to the passion week. It was just after Jesus moved into Jerusalem in the spirit and pageantry of a king that the Passion Week started: the arrest, trial, crucifixion and death. In the process of his trial, the central point of his accusation and condemnation was all about this issue of a king of the kingdom.
John 18:33-36 "Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again and called Jesus and said unto him: art thou the king of the Jews?"
In the beginning when he was born, the attack on him was because he was the king. Throughout his life, up till the trial, the main question they raised in judgment was his kingship. This is quite significant because it will change your mind set. He was not arrested, detained, tried and then crucified because he was a preacher. The bone of contention was the kingship. "Then Pilate asked him: Art thou the king of the Jews?"
Hear the answer: "Jesus answered; sayest thou this of thyself or did others tell it thee of me"
"Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thy own nation and the chief priest hath delivered thee unto me. What hast thou done?"
"Jesus answered; My kingdom is not of this world, if my kingdom were of this world, then will my servants fight and I will not be delivered to the Jews, but now is my kingdom not from hence. Pilate therefore said unto him: Art thou a king then?"
Jesus answered thou sayest that I am a king."
Notice that Jesus is beginning to talk about the kingdom. He has agreed that he is a king. In fact, in Jewish tradition, when the judge begins to ask a question such as Pilate asked, and then the answer Jesus gave in verse 24, it implies that the judge is saying what he is saying because he believed it.
If you follow the argument, it’s like they are questioning his claim to a kingdom, his claim to being a king, so that they can finally nail him.
What is a king doing in another man’s kingdom? Do you know the implication of you parading yourself as a king when you know you are in another kingdom? You are simply asking for war. You cannot be operating a Christianity that is not war conscious, if you are kingdom minded. It simply means that you have not entered the kingly ministry of the Christian life. So long as you are running away from violence, you have not even started advancing the cause of your kingly ministry and that is to say that you don’t even have a gospel yet. The whole thing about the gospel is not about just good news of getting some blessings. It is the good news that a king who will forcefully deliver us has finally come, our bondage has finally ended. Your bondage does not end when you are given bread and butter in the prison; your bondage ends when you are brought out of the prison against the wish of your captors. A lot of us have remained comfortable in prison just because you are eating well. So many people would be glad to be in an American prison because the rooms are air conditioned and they don’t miss their meals. A prisoner can sue the prison authorities for not giving him his food at the appropriate time! BUT he is still a prisoner. That is the kind of Christianity a lot of us are practicing. "Well, I am driving a good car, I’m eating well, dressing well..." but you ignore the fact that you are not free.
Only a king can fight and bring deliverance to his people so the expectation of the Jews was for a messiah/king. When the judgment was over and he was being led to crucifixion, the people began to make a mockery of his kingship by forcing a crown of thorns on him. The whole issue was still about his kingship. As he hung on the cross between two thieves, the one on his right said to him: "Remember me when you get into your kingdom." A wonder isn’t it? That a thief will get a revelation that a man hanging helplessly side by side with him could be trusted for a place in the kingdom.
The parable in Luke 19 talks about a man who traveled to a far country to go and obtain a kingdom and to come back. Is it something you buy from the supermarket? NO! It is something you go and fight for, and then forcefully obtain. After resurrection, he showed himself with a lot of infallible proofs and just before he ascended, the last question the disciples asked him was this: "Jesus, now that you’ve died and risen again, our hope has come alive. Now, let us go back to the first issue, the main issue, the core of the matter; will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel." They were no more to be satisfied with the miracles the free bread; the dying and coming alive. Back to the main issue, we we’ve been hoping for, what we’ve always desired and had gone around proclaiming. - the kingdom. “…Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?"
Jesus told them to relax, and that is why we still have a gospel to preach now.
The goal of God is to raise a kingdom, but first, He brings up an organ (the church) that will prepare the kid kings, but we should not mistake the medium that is to prepare the king for the palace of the king.
Simply put: when you look the tabernacle and the three compartments, you will recall that it begins with the altar of brass, (the brazen altar) and what happens on the brazen altar is slaughtering of the animal of sacrifice. Brass in scriptures signifies judgment. That is where all your sins are judged. As the animal is slaughtered, they collect the blood and proceed. That altar prepares us for the sanctuary ministry. Then there is the laver, that same altar that has the water for you to wash (signifies the Word of God). Then you move into the holy place. Note that the journey that began with a sin offering is simply preparing you for the throne of grace. The high point of the journey that only the High Priest concludes is the ministry of the blood on the Mercy Seat and that mercy seat is the throne of Jehovah. Here you find two cherubim guarding that throne. That is where the King of kings sits.
I need to remind you that when the High Priest gets into the Holy of Holies, he has no prayer point and no stories to tell. You know what he does? He sprinkles the blood on the Mercy Seat. There is only one voice that is permitted in the Holy of Holies and that is the blood that is speaking better things than the blood of Abel. Do you know what some of us are sprinkling now? It is the Abel type of blood, the one that is cries for revenge and that is why we want all our enemies killed now. Whoever is not in your good books must be killed by God, right. That type of blood does not touch the Mercy Seat. The blood that is sprinkled on the Mercy Seat is the one that speaks of mercy, mercy, mercy and more mercy.
As you wish your enemy to calamity, if God should judge you, you surely will qualify for death also. So the only thing that the blood does is to cry "Mercy, mercy, mercy..." and who is sitting on that seat? It is the king.
In the next segment, we shall look at the type of program God has for the Church which it seems to be deviating from.
The king of the Kingdom Part two
As we go into this part two, I want you to recognize something: that when God wants to do a thing, He sends forth prophetic words to create a hunger and an expectation amongst the people. As you receive these words, wisdom demands that you lay hold on them, nurture them and put them in the right compartment where they will not be snatched away. It is a thing of joy that you find yourself being a first partaker of these things and you wonder if you have the standing to be able to advance it in the midst of those who appear to know more than you. When it comes to revelation, it doesn’t matter too much whether you are of the age of Samuel or the age of Eli, it depends on your availability. Availability is not so as much as you just residing in the temple, occupying positions in ministry; it has to do with you being available to the current vision. There is a nature inside of you that is hungry for all that God has to deliver. Let me make it simpler: Eli was the priest; Samuel was just a little boy in the school of priests. Why would God bypass Eli? He had not yet handed over; he was still the incumbent high priest. What went wrong? The point was he had lost the vision. He had become ossified with forces of tradition; he had become hardened by "I’m used to it." The major challenge we all have in life is wisdom to handle this positive thing that God gave us - HABIT.
Habit is a gift from God and it simply means that whatever you do two times becomes easier than the first time. So the more it becomes easier, the more you adopt it as a pattern. But for you to break loose from it poses a problem and that’s the reason we must be careful not to allow such a good thing become a prison yard to us. That is why God tells us to be ready to come with open face. Put your gear on neutral so that as God is propelling, there would be no nostalgia, “h, this place that I’m already accustomed to, I don’t want to change” And because you are looking at the immediate, you miss out on the glory that is to come. Christianity becomes a burden when it is no longer from glory to glory .Believers must learn to respond to the glory as it is being progressively revealed by Lord, rather than responding to glories being unveiled by the forces of religion and tradition. You know what we do as preachers? We look for new methods instead of freshness on the same old thing. There is a difference. Doing something new is different from enjoying the freshness of the old. What God wants us to know is that this Word which is as old as we can think of can always come alive fresh as if you’ve never heard it before. You don’t have to dabble into strange and false doctrines just prove that we recently had a dinner with the Lord. Just ask God to open your eyes so that you will see more than you saw before. Now if you come to God with this mind set: "Lord this same thing I’ve been doing before, I want you to increase my capacity for it; increase the supply of the honey on the inside of it; increase my capacity to absorb the nutrients. It is different from you relocating and looking for something new. It is so easy to, in an attempt to change method and preach something new, to drop the integrity of God’s word. God is not saying anything new. There is nothing He wants to tell us that is not in His Word, but what keeps us going is the freshness and it comes in two ways: Remove the veil from your eyes and recognize that with these same eyes with an open heart, you can see more than you’ve ever seen before. My prayer in recent times has been "Lord, open my eyes." Pray this prayer right now: "Father, open my eyes, let me behold wondrous things out of thy law, in the name of the Lord Jesus, Amen.”
Habakkuk said something. He said he was going to stand upon his watch and SEE what He shall SAY unto me." For the grammarians, that may not be the proper way to render it. How can he see what God is saying? He probably meant to say "to HEAR what He will say." Do you want to correct God’s grammar? To see what God will say, simply means that you are expecting that the Lord will make those words become pictures, they put on flesh and become something you can relate with. They become part and parcel of you. What you see once, you can write a long essay about it than what you hear. The devil more easily takes away what you have not been able to impregnate in the realm of the pictorial knowing; when you do not have understanding. It’s like when you memorize some stuff and enter the exam hall; after writing the exam, the thing disappears. Two years later someone says to you: "You are a graduate of chemistry so what is the formula for water?" You’ll ask to be given about ten minutes to find out. Because you never knew it, you only memorized it. Most times it is what you did not understand that the devil takes away. Understanding establishes it in you. Every house is built by knowledge, established by understanding, and by knowledge, chambers are filled with pleasant and precious riches that is the furnishings.
The King of the kingdom we want to see the nature of the kingship that the kingdom to which we belong maintains.
In Exodus 19:6 we see that when God began to raise for himself a people, He had what can be called an eternal purpose. "And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak to the children of Israel."
Note the phrases: Royal priesthood; Kingdom of priests. Now, connect it to this thought:
Hebrews 6:20 "Whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec."
Hebrews 7:1-3 "For this Melchisedec, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him;"
In talking about the kingdom, we also think of a constitution. What I didn’t tell you in Part one is this: by the time you get to John chapter 19, when they were still contending for his kingship, Pilate wrote: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Some of the high priests came to him and said: "Don’t write King of the Jews, put it this way: He said I am the King of the Jews." You know what Pilate said? He said to them: “What I have written, I have written!"
Do you know the implication of that? Concerning the kingdom and concerning any kingdom at all, authority comes from what is written and that is constitution. Forget what the aberrations that you see in some parts of the world those are best described as anarchy; where people force themselves into power and ignore the constitution. It is abnormal, it is anti-Christ, it is a spirit of rebellion and it doesn’t last.
Every throne that be, is instituted by God and when they begin to operate contrary to the order of the creator, they begin to incur some discipline from above. Pilate said "what I have written, I have written." Do you remember when the devil came tempting Jesus, (of course that was one of the toughest battles he fought); the only point of contact with the sword was ‘It is written.’ What the enemy is trying to do today is to alter what is written. I told them at a conference in January that there are over 200 translations of the Bible, in different languages and different versions. Some are Satan orchestrated, just to confuse us. People are generally prone to responding and believing what is written.
So concerning the authority of the kingdom, there was still an attempt to cause Pilate to change what he had written. "Just add a little thing, write: He said I am the king of the Jews." Pilate bluntly refused to amend what he had written." I wish we can get to that point; of standing upon what God has written, and then we will know how to defend the authority of the kingdom. Every punctuation mark, the comma, full stop, and apostrophe, matter a lot in God’s word. Every jot or title must be regarded because they must all be fulfilled.
We are talking about the nature of the king of the kingdom so that we can properly align ourselves with His agenda.
Hebrews 7:1 is describing Melchisedec and in those three verses, (1-3), so many things are revealed. Follow me closely.
"For this Melchisedec, king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him;"
He is described as King of Salem, and also described as Priest of the most high God. We are told that he met Abraham returning from the slaughter of kings and blessed him.
Verse 2: "To whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all; first being by interpretation King of righteousness, and after that also King of Salem, which is, King of peace; Verse 3 says: "Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually."
Hebrews6:20 tells us that Jesus was made a priest after the order of Melchisedec .In order for us to have an idea of the type of priesthood Jesus stands for, it gives us an introduction to whom Melchisedec is. Now, something very striking comes up. It says this Melchisedec is the priest of the most high God. In Genesis 14, this same man met Abraham. "And Abraham paid tithe to this man. There is something about Melchisedec that represents everything Jesus stands for as a priest and it brings out something that pertains to what we are sharing now. Priest of the Most High God, King of righteousness and King of peace.
The Church was raised up as an instrument to raise up kings who will know how to operate as priests. The nature of kingship that pertains to the kingdom, the nature of kingship that Jesus Christ represents or symbolizes, is the priesthood after the order of Melchisedec. You will discover that this same Melchisedec is actually Jesus. The difference between every other kingdom (past, present or future), and this kingdom we are talking about is that in this one we have the fusion, the union, the harmonization of priesthood and kingly ministries. They are two extremes tearing the whole globe apart. Those who emphasize the priestly ministry operate as the Lamb of God. They are born again; they would not hurt an ant. Even when you slap them ten times, they will keep saying ‘I am sorry sir.’ Holy, holy, humble, humble. That is one extreme.
The other extreme are those who are building their kingdom. They become general overseers and any mistake you make, they hit you with the rod real hard. They have the final say in everything, no one dare challenge their authority.
Now neither of these two is permitted in our kingdom but we are seeing such things in the Church today. If the pastor’s wife doesn’t like you, you are in trouble and if the pastor himself does not like you, you will never be promoted. That is operating the kingly anointing without the priestly anointing. The priest in Hebrews 5 is the one that has compassion for the people because he himself has infirmity like those he is ministering to. The only person you see that mirrors Melchisedec in the Bible is King David. And that is the only man the Bible says was after God’s heart.
The point you should go away with is this: God is raising up kings, but He takes them through the school of priesthood so that they will be kings who will learn how to worship. God’s plan is to make a kingdom where the kings are also priests; they will know how to operate both in the temple and in the palace; they can marry both. That was what Jesus symbolized. It is then that forgiveness and compassion can flow from. It is then you can manage the rod and the staff correctly.
David was going to war and he had 600 fighters. Two hundred were not disposed to go, only 400 fought. When they came back, the 400 said ‘Sir, since the 200 did not go with us, we are not going to give them part of the goodies.’ David said no, that it doesn’t work that way. "We are all one; we went to fight on their behalf. They are part of us, it’s just that they were not too okay, we are going to give them their fair share." That is the heart of a priest.
This is the same man that fought so many wars that God saw him as a bloody guy and when he was to build the temple, God said he should leave it for his son because he has fought too many wars. Here, we see somebody who can be very meek and yet fierce in battle. In Psalm 144:1, Blessed be the Lord my God, who teachest my hands to war and my fingers to fight." He was a man of war from childhood. Yet, when he comes to the Church, he dances like an usher. I want to be a king and a priest. You know the problem some people have? When they begin to taste the kingly anointing, they get too big to dance in the church. That is one extreme. Then there are those who because of the priesthood thing do not know how to operate in authority. When they should fight, bind and lose and get aggressive, they are just chicken out in mediocrity. The government tramples on them, society tramples on them, they see their right being denied them and they say: "It is neither by power nor by might. That is deadly. Some of us bought into group A and some bought into group B; neither of them belongs to the kingdom. The acceptable priesthood is the one after the order of Melchisedec - Priest of the Most High, then King of Righteousness and King of Peace.
Do you know that King David got to a point that he was thirsty, and the battle was fierce and he had one of those tough men that broke through the ranks of the enemy to get him a cup of water, and when the guy brought the water he said: "Your Lordship, here is water." What did David say? He said "This is blood, no; let us give it to the Lord." What does this symbolize? It shows the king and the priest anointing together.
It is like the general overseer that somebody brings his only car to; the only car taking his family to school and work and says "Man of God, I am giving this to you,." and the man of God already has three cars and he, out of greed, takes that one and parks in his garage and goes about boasting: "I have four cars in my garage," while that brother and the family are suffering! Those are the people that drink such of such cups that David refused to drink but offered it to the Lord. They have compassion, they know when children of God are over zealous and they say: "No, don’t kill yourself, I release the car back to you, but God will bless you for sowing it from your heart. They know how to operate as kings and priests; that is the kingdom we are talking about. You see that somehow we have been operating something else. It is the mind of God to make a kingdom; kingdom is the realm of dominion that the king has. The area that the king has subdued is his kingdom. KINGDOM means king’s dominion, the domain where the king is reigning, that is his kingdom. So first, the must be a king that is exercising authority, subduing grounds beginning in your life and in mine life. Jesus is the king of our kingdom. Let’s bow and worship him with our best at all times. Amen.
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